Mainly Macintosh

Is video/digicam the new note-passing?

I was in the Apple Store yesterday - Saturday evening. There was something that may or may not be interesting going on.

A group of five teenaged girls were using 2 of the iMacs on display; the 24 inch and the 20 inch display models.

At the time, I was pretty rushed, so I did not really stop and think about what they were trying to do with the computer. They seemed to be using the Photo Booth application as a photobooth.

I was in a hurry to make a decision about which one to buy, after having my original choice, the Mac Mini, torpedoed because it is limited to just 1 GB of RAM - not enough for a programmer these days.

Guys are not really big into note-passing, from what I remember. Nor of having their pictures taken. Nor, for that matter, buying clothes.

It seems like a computer marketed to teenaged and twenty-something boys and girls would have to have some different features in order to suit both groups.

Yesterday, one of those features, Photo Booth - seemed to be the hit in the school girls crowd. It is an application that does the same thing as a coin-operated photo booth. It uses the built-in iSight cam to take a picture. It is very easy to use. After the photo is taken, you can do some effects on it, if you want.

The average person in the computer field - programmer, manager, tester - is probably not going to think of a goofy built-in digital camera hardware+application feature as something that could lead to a sale.

However, I also noticed that the girls gravitated to the pair of Macs with the largest screens that were next to each other as the ones they wanted to use.

Macs look great. They take up less space than ever before. They are very functional but also aesthetically pleasing. They have built into themselves a lot of cool features.

Maybe Apple has created something that will really sell into the high school & college kid crowd in a way that earlier Macs have not.

posted by John Collins @ 7:41 PM